Thursday, June 18, 2009

Summer Roofing II

This adventure was really exciting and pretty nerve wracking now that I think back to it. Here's how it went down:
Gear-
Me
Green Field Shirt
Brown Tank Top
Camo Cargo Shorts
Black Sneakers
Crisis
Navy Long Sleeve
White Short Sleeve
Jeans
Grey Converse
We were hanging out with some friends at night, feasting on free food (if you hang out late enough good left over food gets thrown out, just ask the guy to take some before they toss it) and walking around. After a while everyone needs to go home. Me and Crisis had decided ahead of time to do some roofing that night so this is our chance. After we all split up me and Crisis walk to a street where we want to climb a house. It's just a ladder leading to a fire escape in from of a lit garage.
Once we get there we sit on the stoop of an abandoned house and watch for people until the street clears out. After that I hop a low rail and climb up the ladder (it's much louder than I'd like) and start up the stairs. After one flight I stick to the wall and wait for Crisis, (his ascent is just as loud, I don't like the ladder). We go up the rest of the stairs and climb the hook ladder at the top flight to get to the roof.
This seems like a regular ordinary block of roofs until we notice once thing; the door leading inside one of the apartment buildings is wide open with light leaking out. Wow, you're leaving a huge welcome sign to any burglars who know how to use binoculars...
We decide to keep exploring the roofs before we do anything with the door. We climb over the door and check the sky light to look down into the staircase it leads to then proceed to the end of the block. On the last house we find a nice setup of chairs and a table where we lounge out and enjoy the view of the city for a while. After some relaxing we decide to go back down, Crisis is set on getting back to street level through the apartment building.
We get to the open doorway and check around before going in, Crisis is in point and he tests the first step, it squeaks more than a haunted house in scooby doo. Doesn't matter, step two is quiet, but step three is the loudest step ever also. We brace ourselves between the banister and the wall and swing down to the next landing quietly. We then jog down the rest of the stairs and just walk out the front door. Kinda very stressful the fact that we walked down the staircase of an apartment building we knew nothing about but it turned out good.
After leaving the apartment we decided to climb a nearby friend's house (well our goal was to get onto his roof). We walked down his block and went under an apartment into the back yards (there are small unlocked passageways that go from the streets to the yards). Once in the back yards Crisis gave me a boost to a fire escape and then climbed up an AC to get on himself. The fire escape was covered in chipping paint and seemed old. As I started on the stairs I realized that one was missing and the one underneath was loose I warned Crisis and we headed up until w-- CRACK! A stair breaks off under Crisis' foot (apparently more than one stair was loose). We keep going up and paint is chipping off everywhere, as we reach the top flight a light comes on in a window and my back goes against the wall, Crisis crouches halfway up the stairs. A hand pulls back some curtains and I see a face approach the window. After a few seconds the face retreats and the curtains close, the lights go back off. We slink back down the fire escape (the fire escape clearly hates us anyways) and jump across to the one on the next building. As we climb that one nothing seems to go wrong, we fast and silent like the ninjas we are but maybe there are ninjas in the house we're going up also because some lights come one while we're going up the ladder :?, I'll never know...
Once we finally get to the roof we moved around a bit and decided to head down in case people called the cops on us. Went down our friend's fire escape which is actually sturdy and hopped a fence. We walked to the park and lay low for a while then each of us went home. My cab driver was a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Lessons learned: Don't trust rusty old fire escapes.

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